Go to Where the Actual Work Is Being Done

Do you often feel reactive instead of proactive? Do people complain that decisions at the top take too long to percolate down to the frontlines? If so, you probably manage your organization and your direct reports through weekly meetings and email. You should instead consider “leader standard work.”

Leader standard work is a term often used in lean manufacturing. However, it needn’t be confined to the factory floor — it’s equally valuable anywhere in the organization. In its simplest form, leader standard work is a regular cadence of activities and questions that bring leadership into physical contact with managers and frontline employees. It gets leaders out of their offices and onto the company floor where the actual work is being done.

Standard work isn’t just for people at lower levels of the organization, or people doing repetitive jobs. Leaders need similar standards as well. Without them, managerial time and attention are ineffectually fragmented among the dozens of pressing issues that crop up each day. Leaders also lose visibility into the overall health of the company (or a department). Their exposure and involvement consists of firefighting, not fire prevention. Moreover, employees and managers lose the vital, trust-building connection with leadership that helps sustain culture and habits through tough times.

At its most basic level, leader standard work involves:

Walking the floor of the company at regular and predictable times. The business of the company doesn’t occur in conference rooms; it occurs where employees are creating the products and services your company provides. It’s therefore necessary to “go and see” what’s happening with your own eyes. You should have a posted list of what areas of the organization you’re going to visit and when you’re going to do it. Depending on the time of year or a particular strategic objective you’re working on, you may visit some areas daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Irrespective of the cadence, it must be regular and predictable.

Conducting structured conversations. Visiting people on the frontlines is neither a social call nor an interrogation — and it’s certainly not a performance review. It consists of repeatedly asking a set of questions, such as:

What’s the target you’re trying to achieve?

How are you doing versus the goal?

What problems have happened recently?

How do you plan on solving those problems?

How can I help?

These questions are particularly powerful when they go up and down the chain of command — when CEO ask VPs, VPs ask managers, and managers ask frontline staff in a tightly scheduled series of meetings.

Structured conversations keep leadership abreast of organizational performance in real-time. They highlight problems and enable leadership to deploy resources to solve them before they metastasize.

Using simple visible tools to guide the conversation and make abnormalities visible. White boards with post-it notes or note cards showing project status are perfect examples. Without these tools, leader standard work becomes a social event — conversations rapidly lose focus, and deteriorate into vague, general discussions about “how things are going.” Grounding the conversation in the bedrock of actual work and other relevant data keeps the focus on performance and aberrations. At CapitalOne, for example, one of the procurement teams uses a board that shows where purchase requests are in the queue, how long they’ve been in the system, who’s working on them, and what problems might be slowing the process down. When managers and executives meet with the team, they can see at a glance what’s happening, and can focus their conversation on the current conditions and improvements that need to be made.

Equally important is a visible management board for leadership that shows whether they’ve followed their own standards: did they visit all areas they were supposed to? Did they perform the checks they planned? Did they spot any problems they want to be sure they address on their next visit? At Group Health in Seattle, leaders have a highly visible system that shows everyone the visits executives are supposed to make each day and if they’ve done so. This system creates predictability and two-way accountability.

It’s tempting for leaders to complain, “My work life is utterly chaotic and unpredictable. There’s no way that I could set — or follow — this kind of schedule.” Remember, though, that standard work comprises only a small percentage of your day. And when done consistently, will reduce the amount of firefighting that you have to do. Modeling this kind of behavior is the most powerful way to embed it in your culture.

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